Tech

Actor and comedian Michael Rapaport celebrated the shuttering of Chinese-owned social media outlet TikTok, which went dark on Sunday in the wake of a ban put in place by an act of Congress. TikTok went dark on Sunday in compliance with the ban put in place by Congress and upheld on Friday by the U.S. Supreme court….

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is leaving the company after eight years at the helm, following a terribly bungled app redesign that angered customers and hindered growth. Bloomberg reports that Sonos has announced that Chief Executive Officer Patrick Spence is stepping down from his role after an eight-year tenure. The decision comes on the heels of a botched app…

NASA’s leading center for scientific innovation in fields including robotic planetary exploration, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), has been temporarily closed due to the approaching Eaton wildfire in Southern California. Space.com reports that the JPL, located at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains just north of Los Angeles, is a federall08y funded research and development center…

Denis Villeneuve, director of the hit sci-fi franchise Dune, expressed dismay about how individualism has suffered during the age of Big Tech. Speaking with the Los Angeles Times, Villeneuve lamented that “human beings are ruled by algorithms right now,” adding that he keeps a strict no cell phone policy on his movie sets. “We behave like AI circuits….

Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI researcher who accused the company of violating copyright law, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment late November according to newly released documents. The Mercury News reports that Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old former OpenAI researcher known for blowing the whistle against the AI powerhouse, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment…

OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT-01 model has exhibited troubling behavior during safety tests, including using deception to avoid being shut down and replicating its own code to another server to ensure its survival. The International Business Times reports that in a collaborative safety experiment conducted by OpenAI and Apollo Research, the cutting-edge ChatGPT-01 reasoning model displayed disconcerting conduct that has…

UCLA says it will offer a comparative literature course featuring a textbook, class assignments, and teaching assistant resources developed by AI. The comparative literature course will be offered in the winter of 2025, and will “be the first class in its humanities division with materials developed by Kudu” — a UCLA-developed AI system — the university announced last week. The course,…

Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram is failing to remove explicit self-harm images and is even encouraging vulnerable teens to connect with each other, enabling the concerning content to proliferate on the platform, according to an alarming new study. The Guardian reports that the research, conducted by Danish organization Digitalt Ansvar (Digital Accountability), set up a private Instagram network including fake…

Hollywood star Alyssa Milano is the latest left-wing celebrity to flee from X / Twitter following President-elect Donald Trump’s victory. Over the years, she used the platform to launch attacks on then-Supreme Court nominee, now Justice Brett Kavanaugh; anoint herself the queen of the #MeToo movement; and lecture Americans about COVID measures, abortion, and a…

The DOJ and Google presented their closing arguments in the antitrust trial focusing on the internet giant’s stranglehold over the online ads business, with both sides reiterating their main points from the three-week trial held in Alexandria, Virginia. Marketing Brew reports that in the closing arguments of Google’s second antitrust trial this year, the DOJ and Google…